Procession, Prayer and Presence

Communion With the Enchanted Ordinary

Photo by Ruth Gledhill on Unsplash

Christ is ascended! From earth to heaven! Greetings, friends.

This is getting to be a fairly frequent quarterly newsletter, isn’t it? Hah! Well, before I get to a little bit of summer project news, I have some thoughts about Americana and the enchanted cosmos you might enjoy. It seems to be fashionable to talk about enchantment lately, doesn’t it? The trouble is that there are so many different ways to think about it. For myself, I have come to understand the “enchanted cosmos” as a description of how reality actually works on multiple levels, including the very human levels of psychic and archetypal as well as the more esoteric ones, like the spiritual and noetic. In fact, my experiential investigations of multileveled reality seem to resist easy definition, and instead revel in a beautiful complexity that is equally accessible and mysterious. Without further ado, let us commence!

Does your town do anything to remember Memorial Day? Ours does, and I’ve been blessed to attend the services now for almost thirty years. We start early with a small parade-- 8:30 is an early start for people who otherwise would be sleeping in on a three-day weekend, but so many years, it really does get hot enough by ten to make a few high schoolers faint, so 8:30 it is. The American Legion sponsors the event, and local veterans groups, clubs like the Optimists and the Lions, the local scout troops, the emergency responders, and the school’s marching band form the procession. One lovely woman dresses her horse up in red, white and blue sequins, and we’ve even acquired a pipe and drum band, which is seriously charming. The parade processes to a cemetery, where the American Legion leads the town in a prayerful memorial ceremony that particularly honors the people who gave their lives during American armed conflicts.

We are the Dead. Short days ago
We lived, felt dawn, saw sunset glow,
    Loved and were loved, and now we lie,
        In Flanders fields.

In Flanders Fields, John McCrae

Like any human endeavor, especially communal ones, people show up with mixed motives. Main Street is lined with pre-schoolers waiting for the fire trucks, band parents waiting to see their kids perform, veterans and their families, and different batches of locals just out to enjoy the holiday morning. Some people are there because they feel a sense of obligation to the dead; others just feel a sense of obligation to whoever told them they should show up. It’s this element of human complexity that, I think, marks the endeavor as authentically human, and not only shallow or even propagandist. I mean, don’t get me wrong-- those elements are there. But they are mixed in with so many others: the sobriety of the Legion’s prayer service, the intensity of the selected readings, the heartfelt reverence and sorrow so many people truly do feel for the dead, the impatience of the tired mom who just wants a cup of coffee while her toddler squeals at the spinner on the ladder truck, the grouchiness of the curmudgeon who grumbles about how slowly the boys take off their caps for the anthem.

The psychological texture of all these mixed motives is part of what makes the experience real. If we all felt the same thing, if we were all in tune with a single interpretation of meaning, the experience would be flattened. But because the ceremony itself is established and has existence beyond our willingness to be there or ‘believe’ in it, we can each receive an experience that is responsive to what we bring to it. Some years, for me, have involved wrestling and dissatisfaction with what I have crankily called the ‘cult of the soldier’, but other years have brought deeper reflection on how natural love for one’s land and people can be weaponized into nationalism. Some years I just look around the graveyard and think about all of the human beings who have died, some for very stupid reasons, so many in the meat grinder of the modern world. It’s good to remember ancestors.

Far-called, our navies melt away;
   On dune and headland sinks the fire:
Lo, all our pomp of yesterday
   Is one with Nineveh and Tyre!
Judge of the Nations, spare us yet,
Lest we forget—lest we forget!

Recessional, Rudyard Kipling

One reason why Memorial Day has become so important to me is that it is my yearly opportunity to pray with my community. There is no Orthodox Church in my town; we travel over a half hour to our home parish. But I’ve found that praying with my neighbors, even on a palatable, acceptable ecumenical level, unites me with them in an essential way. I can almost see beyond the veil, to where we might all be one, if we could just get out of our own ways. There is a very real human hunger for procession, for memorial, for common prayer.

Every year, I am struck by how the fragile dream of Americana clings to reality, despite our consumerist society’s every attempt to commodify it, to politicize it, to make it into something useful for someone. But still it lingers, this dream of being able to co-create a society of equals, this deep-rooted human desire to live embodied in a community that knows how to be together.

Reading synchronicity is one of the great joys of the literary life, isn’t it? It just so happens that I am recently reading through John Truby’s Anatomy of Genres, and I was struck particularly by his chapters on American mythology. We don’t often stop to think about ourselves as having one; instead, we get caught up in the romance of Irish fairies, Norse trolls or Japanese ghosts. But if Truby is right, our pantheon is just as packed with mythological creatures-- they just look like cowboys, gangsters, and detectives. The landscape of our mythology isn’t the World Tree or the hollow hills, but rather this liminal concept of the frontier, a borderland between the juggernaut of Western civilization and the terrifying, un-managed, un-controlled chaos of the natural North American continent. I’m not saying the continent really WAS this way-- I’m saying that it was perceived this way and interacted with in this way in American mythology, that these mythological suppositions were embedded into the way Americans have told stories.

Wabano Giiwaabimaa Anishnawbe
Shawinoong Giiwaabimaa Anishnawbe
Nengabiiwwinoong Giiwaabimaa Anishnawbe
Kiiwaytinoong Giiwaabimaa Anishnawbe
Gizhi Manitou Giiwaabimaa Anishnawbe

Four Directions Song

Of course, I was also just reading Robin Wall Kimmerer’s latest book, The Serviceberry: Abundance and Reciprocity in the Natural World, which is one of the many pieces of indigenous narrative that demonstrates that the pre-colonial North American continent was a place of human and ecological thriving. The fact that post-colonial mythology acted in opposition to reality actually demonstrates the point: that American mythology has largely been idolatrous, and the stories in service to this mythology demonic in their deception. I think the rumblings in the collective unconscious about returning to an enchanted cosmos are the sound of the awakening desire to shed this bad mythology, to alchemize the nugget of truth inside of them.

Far from ignoring the violence with which the American continent was settled by Europeans, our American mythology contained the seeds of its own destruction; it couldn’t help but acknowledge, even if obliquely and unwillingly, the destruction of the land and the genocides of the indigenous people of American and the enslaved Africans. In the service of false gods, our myths have often served to obfuscate the terrible guilt that has roiled beneath the surface of American culture for centuries. This is the particular power of continuing our Memorial Day ceremonies: We can affirm the goodness in procession, prayer, memorial and communion as we simultaneously transform the old mythology into something more spacious.

Photo by Chad Madden on Unsplash

“People back then were different, they believed different things, they didn’t understand that slavery and killing Indians and deforesting the east coast were wrong.” I’m sure we’ve all encountered someone, somewhere who has tried to push this kind of argument, this appeal to historical relativism. The problem is that it assumes a level of breathtaking religious ignorance, one that I believe actually slanders Christ. Follow me here. Most American colonists were Christian, likely Protestant, which means that there was quite the emphasis on personal devotion. Supposedly men like Lewis and Clark, like Daniel Boone, like Pa Ingalls and all their contemporaries, were reading their Bibles and actually, you know, praying.

One alternative is that their Bible reading and prayers were absolutely impotent in their ability to impart a coherent moral theory to their lives, one that was able to see the image of God in every fellow human being and the wisdom of God in the “abundance and reciprocity” of the Edenic North American wilderness-- in which case, I’d say that’s a religious fail so epic in its scope, I don’t know how anyone can rescue it, and we have a whole other conversation to have.

The other alternative is that they all knew on some level that murder and violence and rape of land and people were wrong, and they made their excuses in sins and did it anyway. Is that grieving to the Holy Spirit? I should think it’s likely. If that’s the case, then something interesting has been happening in American mythology over the past few decades, something that has taken the raw material of propaganda and pressured it to evolve.

Because it’s important to note that government social propaganda was happening, that the American myth worked in the service of the rich and powerful and that too often the churches here were working hand-in-glove with it. I remember when Stamped From the Beginning and White Trash came out-- can you believe it’s almost ten years ago?-- both of which were seriously damning to the American story. But remember, people are complex. And what we’ve actually seen happen to American mythology, especially in storytelling, is inversion with incredible power. Yes, it destabilizes the mythological constructs of the American Dream and its pillars like Manifest Destiny and capitalism as moral philosophy, but cracks are where the light gets in, as the great bard sang. What started as mere government social propaganda has entered the crucible of the storytellers.

Here’s that mystery of reading synchronicity again: I recently saw a great Substack article on symbolism in the movie Tombstone which illustrates what I’m talking about. Or, alternatively, we could yap for a few hours about my actual favorite western, Rango, in which the Spirit of the West is embodied as Clint Eastwood with a metal detector, driving a golf cart through the desert with some golden Oscars bouncing around in the back, preaching existentialism to a chameleon in the tones of Timothy Olyphant. American mythology is collapsing under the weight of its own hubris, and something changed is emerging.

The John Wayne cowboy is no longer worshipped unironically. My husband’s grandfather, right before he passed away, gave a toast to his family in which he lamented following the creed of the Hollywood western: Real men never cry, real men never apologize. He couldn’t quite say he was sorry, but he could sidle up to it, stare off into the distance, and regret that he never learned how. I think that generation tried very hard to believe the mythology, perhaps because nothing prepared them for the shadow work of grappling with the violence of the modern era, but ultimately they did not succeed. How could they? They watched their efforts at community building crumble because the following generations weren’t interested in their particular brands of hypocrisy.

This critical posture isn’t even new; it’s been brewing for decades. Star Trek introduced itself as an exploration of “the final frontier”-- but instead of raping and pillaging, conquering and destroying, the expeditions of the Enterprise were characterized by intellectual curiosity and generosity of spirit. You might even argue that Star Trek is an apology of the collective unconscious, the American desire for a rewriting of history in which the liminal frontier is approached in harmony and integrity with the Christian principles we claimed as foundational for our society.

As the cowboy decreases, the Indian increases. One of the necessary inversions in the mythology involves acknowledging that the people who were here first know things about this land that we also must need to know in order to live well here. A few years back, I was fortunate to attend my first inter-tribal powwow. I wasn’t sure what to expect-- I had a sense that there would probably be some crystal ladies and some Vietnam vets along with the traditional regalia and dancing-- but what I didn’t anticipate was meeting a new friend who was generous enough to introduce me to the Cherokee way of interacting with the world. He has since reposed, but I think of him often, especially on powwow days.

Photo by Brittany Clark on Unsplash

Again with the synchronicity! I was just at a powwow last week, contemplating how the ceremonies that have been preserved-- and Lord God, when you understand how much was lost, how much was deliberately destroyed and desecrated, it makes you weep-- the gregarious, social, hospitable dances of the powwow are perfect examples of how the enchanted cosmos works as a communion-building ecosystem. Procession into the dance circle followed by reverent prayer during the grand entry, surrounded by a community with rich psychological texture and motivations. This is the same trifecta I saw at Memorial Day: procession, prayer/ceremony, and community.

Then, as if she wanted to make a point, wanted me to pay attention to the dominoes she was lining up for me, just days after the powwow, the Hawaiian Iveron Icon of the Theotokos came to visit us, and all my thoughts were confirmed. If you aren’t familiar, myrrh streaming icons have been haunting Orthodox history for centuries, inspiring deep reverence and piety among the faithful. The Hawaiian Iveron Icon continues this tradition, and in her presence, the one who prays begins to sense how the levels of reality interpenetrate one another. The icon was processed into the church, we prayed intensely, and the community offered up its existence through multiple planes of being, in all of its organic complexity. Believers and inquirers alike were anointed with the rose-scented miracle, for the healing of soul and body.

The enchanted cosmos is real.

It never left.

This is what it looks like, what it smells like.

The human hunger for procession, memorial, communion and prayer is present in so many fractalized forms.

It is complex and ambiguous, gregarious and hospitable. It is big enough for all of our mixed motivations, including our feeble beliefs and our distracted awareness. It reveals itself in the crack of a twenty-one gun salute and the echo of Taps over a cemetery hill, in the driving of the drums and the delight in the dance, in the loving face of a wonderworking, myrrh-streaming icon of our Champion Leader.

Hawaiian Iveron Icon

Before I started writing speculative fiction, I was a reader of speculative fiction. I’m mentioned elsewhere how certain books did the heavy lifting in priming my imagination for Orthodoxy, such as Elizabeth Goudge’s The Little White Horse. Sometimes it feels like I’ve been hunting the enchanted cosmos my whole life. When my older kids were young, I read a lot of educational philosophy as I was developing my own pedagogy, and one of the ideas I came across in a Montessori book was that a child who is obsessed with reading fantasy may actually be expressing spiritual hunger that is not being fulfilled in the child’s religious environment.¹

This may not be true for everyone, but it so emphatically described my own experience as a child, I had to take it seriously. This was especially curious to me because none of my own children have mimicked my own childhood compulsive reading behaviors-- they enjoy reading and being read to, but they don’t obsess over books the way I did as a child and young adult. They love fantasy, but they also love history and the natural sciences; they don’t pore over literary magic as if holds the key to unlocking the mystery of life.

Could it be true, then, that as a child, I was searching for spiritual answers in my fantasy books? And that my own children, raised authentically in the Orthodox faith, in a household that takes spiritual practice seriously, not only in church but in our own larger community, praying at parades and powwows and wonderworking icons-- could it be that they did not need to seek out substitute magic in the same way that I did? Much like a person who is calcium deficient might crave cheese and ice cream, might a person who is deficient in a spiritual understanding of the cosmos seek to fill that hunger in other ways?

I see that question echoed in how so many people are thinking about the enchanted cosmos, and it’s worth pointing out that it’s not a new train of thought. W.B. Yeats and his contemporaries spent quite a lot of time traipsing around the Irish countryside, interviewing pre-industrial country folk before they died, in an effort to capture what it might be like to live a life that truly believed in fairies, and out of that very bourgeois family of endeavors was born the 20^th century occult movement. And though esoteric philosophies can feel very spooky and mystical, they actually work in a completely opposite way to the hum-drum, run-of-the-mill, everyday enchantment present in the Memorial Day parade, the powwow, and the myrrh-streaming icon: Occult magic is gnostic, hidden, solipsistic; though brightly colored, its psychological container is actually quite small, focused on realizing the will of the practitioner. It looks like enchantment to the untrained eye, but cannot fulfill its promise because it is not able to handle the multilevelness of organic complexity in reality. It is fantasy written on a larger screen.

The true enchanted cosmos, the one we can all touch right this very moment, is much more humble. Like the Triune God, its Creator, it waits for us to be quiet and pay attention. It’s already here in a still, small voice; it doesn’t need us to believe anything especially difficult about it. It humbly manifests itself in such things as procession, prayer, memorial, community; in all the complexity of the organic world and the riches of the interpenetrating levels of reality.

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Recently Reshelved

This section is short this time! I am locking in on finishing two very meaty books, which I hope to write about in my next newsletter. In the meantime:

1. Gathering Moss and The Serviceberry: Abundance and Reciprocity in the Natural World, by Robin Wall Kimmerer

Bonus: A Natural History of Eastern Trees, by Donald Culross Peattie

Any decent education in American natural history will immediately lead the student to the conclusion that the past 400 years have seen nothing less than the rape of an entire continent. It didn’t need to be this way, as Kimmerer elegantly demonstrates. Although she’s known best for her book Braiding Sweetgrass, I was actually most charmed by her first book about moss. I love when a book immediately changes the way I perceive my immediate surroundings, which is exactly what this one did: Upon finishing the last chapter, I marched out to my back yard and located a handful of different bryophytes to encounter under the magic spell of my stereo microscope. Enchanted cosmos, indeed.

2. The Starbridge Books, by Susan Howatch

So, I didn’t actually just finish these books, though I have read them twice before. Instead, I’ve had the rare pleasure of enjoying listening to my sister react to her first read through the series. There’s nothing like sharing a beloved book with a beloved person, is there? These books are chock full not only of complex psychological profiles, but also of sincere religious grappling executed by deeply flawed, but generally well-intentioned human beings. Howatch holds a mirror up to some very mysterious parts of our psyche: the development of persona instead of personality, the misuse of spiritual gifts, the poison of envy and comparison, the deception of looking for love in the wrong ways, our constant temptation to hubris, the unrelenting spiritual battle that is the course of our entire lives. This literary magic is performed in front of the backdrop of the Anglican Church over the course of the 20^th century, simultaneously giving a birds’ eye view of the tapestry of theology that was written in just a few decades. Being able to talk about it with my sister? This is the real magic.

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News and Announcement!

Ahh, finally! My summer project announcement. In just a few weeks, I’ll be launching a short-fiction writing project called “A Dozen Days of Magical Realism.” I’ll be writing one dozen pieces of flash fiction, posted daily, with the purpose of introducing you to the kind of writing I actually do most of the time. The fun part is that I’m inviting you to play along with me! When the game starts, I’ll post the rules and a list of topics. Every day I’ll post a new piece in Notes, and anyone who wishes can post along with the same prompt in the same thread. Wouldn’t you love to see Substack flooded with such extravagant imagination?

“When’s the start date?!” I can already hear you asking. Well, my friends, I’m shooting for two weeks, inshallah, God willing and the creek don’t rise. Stay tuned.

Until next time!

-Laura

1. I don’t have a reference for this-- sorry! I have historically been very poor at keeping notebooks. I’ve always wanted to, have even had good intentions, but it’s never worked out for me.